D&D General [rant]The conservatism of D&D fans is exhausting.

[FrogReaver]

Is our point to make sure that everything matches FrogReaver's personal lexicon?

I just want them to use the terms correctly. Nothing to do with my personal lexicon.

Let us say the next step on "the path" is for the players to meet with Robin Hood. However, the players are currently mucking about in Nottingham, and are talking about seeing if they can go find King Richard, and convince him to return to the area.

The GM has the Merry Men waylay the PCs on the road, to force them to meet Robin.

Whether the players object to that or not does not change the nature of the GM's action - it just changes the social repercussions of the action.

So, I'd say GM force is force, whether the players object to it or not, whether they agree to allowing it or not.

If that is your definition of force then I’d say it is unrelated to being railroaded.

 

[FrogReaver]

My question would be, how can you force someone to do something when they consent to doing that something?

 

[EzekielRaiden]

It doesn't though. I reject both your point and your attempt at humor. We will just have to agree to disagree. Both statements cannot be true.

It certainly looked like it did to me. At the very least, huge chunks of it are functionally identical.

It's quite possible for both statements to be true. It just requires that the player and the GM treat one another as peers who are working together to produce a desirable experience, rather than as a strict hierarchy where the GM dictates and the players fall in line.

And no, the player is free to play a character that could reasonable exist in the world the DM has designed. Not just anything.

So the player actually doesn't have control over their character. They have control only up to the limits placed on them by the GM--which can, and will, be anything the GM feels like.

I do think it is very important. DMs who abandon that authority are poor DMs that I avoid like the plague. It is though a game so in the greater grand scheme of things it is not massively significant. Children starving is significant. Switching DMs or changing games is not.

I would argue that that is a pretty meager account of the significance of what one chooses to spend one's time on. The fact that children starving is significant (which it always should be) has no bearing on whether or not something else can also be significant, just less so. Otherwise, the only thing in the whole world of any significance at all is children starving, and everything else is a functional irrelevancy before the overwhelming importance of that one, sole thing.

Mental health is also significant, for example, and the things one does with one's free time have a pretty major role to play in that.

 

[FrogReaver]

IMO theres seems to be 2 definitions of force in play, one is based on consent/fairness. The other is based on physically causing something to occur.

I think we can all agree the GM causes X to occur and whether it was done with or without player consent or even player fairness. So maybe we should talk in those terms.

 

[TwoSix]

I don’t think games in the right word, maybe playstyles. IMO if it’s a good question then that makes taxonomy considering it very important.

I don't agree. As an example, whether or not a particular game has 3 players or 7 players is a very important, salient difference between two games, but I don't think we need to categorize games in general by exactly how many players they have. (Other than whether or not a game is designed to be played solo.)

This would be opposed to boardgames, where the minimum and maximum player size is even more important, but I still wouldn't categorize any two "2-5 players" games as related.

tl;dr Not everything important is also important to categorize.

What conversation specifically are you trying to have by this intentional provocation? That others distinction between what they mean by linear and railroad is based on consent? Because that’s readily admitted. So what conversation are you trying to illicit?

The one we're already having.

 

[Umbran]

If that is your definition of force

It was an example, not a definition, but okay...

then I’d say it is unrelated to being railroaded.

Except insofar as "force" the the generic name for the tools used to enact railroading, sure.
Specifically, if the GM never needs to use force to keep the players on the path... they aren't railroading them. The players are just going along the path of their own volition. And, this is pretty common stuff - perhaps the best way to get the characters to go through a linear adventure is to create the line as a series of things that the players will want to do anyway!

But I am fine with the idea that there are uses of GM force other than railroading, so that use of force is not, in and of itself, indicative of railroading.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

but 'wanting' or 'hoping' and the dice roll isn't the important part of the action resolution of what makes them different from each other, attacking the orc is a closed-potential outcome, there isn't any possibilities beyond 'hit' or 'miss' when you attempt to resolve the action.

Is it? The possibility of things like critical hits, fumbles, narration resulting in a changed situation of battle, altered priorities, etc. mean that I would not call it a totally closed form. Yes, it is closer to close-ended, but it is not totally so. Otherwise, there would--could--be one and only one narration for what rolling to hit meant on success or failure.

deciphering the runes in this situation is not the same case, there is ambiguity to their meaning, if the runes example was the same as the attack example it would be a question of 'can i translate the runes? yes or no'

Except that IS closed-form. There can only be one answer to that; yes, you can, or no, you can't. You have actually made that less open than even an attack roll.

and the GM would know their meaning and tell you on a success,

You have presumed GM pre-authorship by doing this. In other words, you have presumed the very thing you're trying to demonstrate something about. That's a pretty serious weakness for this argument.

and if the attack example was the same as the runes example it would a question of 'does my attack attempt work? yes or no' but then on a success you could list any type of offensive action against the target,

Surely we do in fact allow such things though? Like if someone wants to trip their target, that's going to be an attack roll, possibly with some kind of modifier to affect the success. Presumably, to respect the specialization of Battle Masters who actually do have a specific tripping maneuver, they would forgo their damage in order to get this benefit. (That's how I've run a number of similar such things: trained folks get their goodies AND their damage, the untrained get their goodies OR damage.) And that exact thing is precisely how Battle Master maneuvers work; the vast majority of them are something you declare after you have rolled to-hit, not before.

you could damage them, you could inflict status, you could even use magic against them because your 'nonspecific attack action' was successful.

Is that not how a Battle Master with some kind of magic training works? Consider a Ellaria, an Elf Fighter (Battle Master) 3/Wizard (Bladesinger) 6. With a single attack roll, she can elect to either perform any maneuver she knows (so long as she still has Superiority Dice left) or any of her cantrips that require an attack roll, since a 6th level Bladesinger can replace one of their two attacks from the Attack action with a cantrip of their choosing.

Your claim is that an attack roll is necessarily one, and only one, specific action, every single time. That isn't true in general, because players often attempt a variety of things for which "an attack roll" is the best-fit mechanic. It also isn't true in several common but specific cases, like Battle Masters, who can (indeed, usually must) declare, after hitting with an attack, that they were using a specific maneuver. And it isn't true of Bladesingers (I just made the example more pointed by using a Battle Master multiclass), who can blend attack cantrips with their regular attack rolls just fine.

So even with this allegedly basic mechanic, we can see that it actually has quite an open-ended spectrum! That would seem to lend a lot of credence--not necessarily a smoking gun, but perhaps the smell of spent powder--to gban007's argument that there is an important symmetry between the "can I read the runes, hoping they will be X?" and "can I attack the orc, hoping I will achieve X?"

 

[AlViking]

It's a large detail in making a normative declaration about whether that game is being conducted properly. It's not a major detail in trying to describe a game taxonomically.


Sometimes friction in communication is a good thing. The provocation inherent in the repurposing is the point.

I don't think going out of your way to annoy people on purpose is a good thing

 

[Maxperson]

I just want them to use the terms correctly. Nothing to do with my personal lexicon.



If that is your definition of force then I’d say it is unrelated to being railroaded.

Is your position that force has to be unwanted to be force? If so I'd like to introduce you to boxing and all kinds of sports where force is used between folks who agree to it. If that's not your position, then I'm unclear about what you are saying.

 

[Maxperson]

This would be opposed to boardgames, where the minimum and maximum player size is even more important

I'll thank you to keep my weight out of this!